August Derleth - The Solar Pons Omnibus Volume 1

by August Derleth

  "I would," I admitted.

  "Yet Spencer was either taken by someone, or he went of his own free will. He might have crossed to the road and stopped a passing car; he might even have caught a train slowing down for the Leckford stop."

  "He might, save that he had no motive to do so."

  "At least, he had no known motive."

  I looked sharply at him, but there was no hint in the head sunk on his chest and the half-closed eyes of the direction of his thoughts. "You think he may have had some such motive?" I asked finally.

  "I am only considering all the possibilities. His Lordship apparently considered but one, which appeared to him as the most likely. It has too often been my experience that the most likely solution is not always the most probable, and that the most improbable solution very often emerges as the only tenable one. You know my methods, Parker."

  He said nothing further until we reached Chilbolton, and then roused himself from his reverie only long enough to say that, since a study of the map indicated that the scene of the disappearance was closer to Leckford than to Chilbolton, we would travel on to that village. Then he lapsed once more into brooding silence.

  The day was mild and sunny, though occasional clouds scudded across the heavens. The countryside around Leckford was indeed a lovely land. Low, wooded hills framed the valley of the Test at that place, and the face of the earth itself was a rich green, that deep summer green of mature verdure. I soon had even better opportunity to view it than I had from the windows of our compartment, for once we had left the train, Pons set out for the Test from Leckford on foot, swinging along in his long-limbed stride to the side of the old canal which carried the branch of the Test through Leckford, and followed the bank of this out of the village in the direction of Chilbolton.

  We were soon out of the village and in a stretch of shaded water, where poplars rose up tall and straight, and willows and alders and osiers bent above the stream. Pons lost no time in beginning to fish, casting his fly with zest and with a skill I had hardly expected of him. Moreover, on his third cast, he hooked a sizable trout which he played with singular ability and presently dropped into his creel.

  We made our way slowly but steadily upstream, until we came within sight of the scene of Spencer's disappearance. It was Pons who first saw the rise from the low, almost boggy river's edge to a higher, more solid bank.

  "If I am not mistaken, that is the site we are looking for, Parker. If I had any doubt, the presence of that fellow leaning against a tree just beyond it would have laid it; that is certainly our estimable friend, Jamison."

  "Will you make yourself known to him?"

  "Let us just proceed as we are. If he should be under surveillance himself, it would never occur to him to think so."

  Accordingly, we went forward, Pons casting now and then, though by this time he had already taken three trout to my pair, and the foliage pressing upon the Test at this point made casting more difficult. He took care to scrutinize the shore as we went, noting footprints at the very water's edge. These might well have been the missing Spencer's for here and there the prints of others, doubtless of those searching for trace of the vanished man, were plainly in evidence, and this one line of footprints had for the most part been carefully preserved. They were lost, however, at the rising ground.

  As we mounted the rise, the portly form of Inspector Jamison rose up before us, his thick moustache bristling, his sharp eyes suspicious.

  "Here, here, what's all this?" he demanded truculently. "What are you doing here?"

  "Ha!" snorted Pons in a disguised voice. "Here is an oaf who does not recognize an angler when he sees one. One might better ask what he is doing here. Why, the fellow looks like an imitation policeman."

  Jamison flushed angrily. "Be off with you. The police are in charge."

  "Fiddlesticks," Pons answered. "We have permission to fish these waters. Where is yours?"

  "We'll see about that," said Jamison ominously. He turned and raised his voice to call, "Cort! Here, please."

  Pons turned to me in mock surprise, his eyes glinting with amusement. "The oaf means what he says."

  By this time, however, Jamison had had a good look at me. "Never mind, Cort," he called out, looking indignantly at Pons. "You must have your sport, eh?"

  "A man ought to combine pleasure with business whenever it is possible to do so," answered Pons. "Nothing has changed?"

  "Nothing."

  "Very well, then. Let us not be seen talking together."

  "My men are all around the place. No one could observe us."

  "Indeed! I recall at least one occasion when a similar confidence almost led to tragedy."

  Pons led the way among the trees and bushes along the risen ground at right angles from the Test, in the direction of the railway-line and the road beyond it. There were no footprints to be followed, yet Pons scrutinized the ground with greater care than he had thus far looked at any portion of the area, and he had not gone far before he bent to pick up something. He held it in the palm of his hand, and I peered at it. It was a dry-fly.

  "A Royal Coachman," I said. "Dropped by some angler."

  "I should hardly have thought it the badge of a police-inspector," said Pons dryly.

  We moved on, and presently Pons picked up a second dry-fly, again a Royal Coachman.

  "A careless angler," I said.

  Then he found another, and yet two more, making a total of five, scattered throughout the grove of trees that held to the rise.

  "Most careless, indeed," he commented.

  He pocketed all five of the Royal Coachmen, his face thoughtful, but did not hesitate in his steady pace, walking onward until we climbed a small fence and mounted the embankment to the permanent way of the London & South Western Railway. There he stood for a few moments, looking beyond the rails to the road, over which lay a mist of dust shot through with sunlight.

  Perhaps a mile or more down the road lay Leckford, its roofs and gables just in sight. A little way in the other direction stood a tinker's van, and beyond it, screened by a grove of trees, a small secluded house. This seemed to catch Pons's eye; his gaze lingered thoughtfully on it for some time, as if he were anxious to scrutinize it with great care, marking its inaccessibility, though its inhabitants evidently had ready access to both railway and road. Then, without comment, Pons crossed the railway-embankment to the road, and began to walk away from Leckford. He drew up at the tinker's van; a hunchbacked old man sat cobbling shoes beside the van, and just beyond it a lone horse was tethered.

  "Good-afternoon," Pons greeted him. "Can you tell me who lives in that house over there?" He pointed with his rod.

  "No, sir. That I can't. I'm a stranger here."

  The tinker had chosen his stand well. He and his van were shaded by the trees of the little grove along the road where the van stood; beyond, on both sides, was treeless country on which the sun doubtless shone remorselessly on hot days. He had been well guided, too, in his decision to keep sufficiently far from Leckford to avoid being taxed or troubled by the local policeman of that village; yet he was not so far away as to enable him to obtain work from Leckford.

  "You've been here for a while, though. Long enough to say whether you've noticed anything unusual going on over there."

  "No, sir, I didn't notice. I mind nobody's business but my own."

  At this point, the door of the van opened, and a pretty, dark- haired girl of perhaps twenty appeared in the doorway. She looked anxiously out at the old man, with but a fleeting glance at us.

  "Don't tire yourself now, father," she admonished.

  "Don't worry yourself," answered the old man.

  Pons thanked him and withdrew, walking on up the road quite rapidly until he reached the vicinity of the secluded house, where he slowed his pace to a more casual saunter and took the opportunity to inspect the house and its tree-girt grounds as carefully as possible without being too obvious in his purpose. Then, inexplicably, he left the road with a mu
rmured admonition to me, recrossed the railway, and plunged once more into the low country toward the brown water of the Test.

  "What now?" I could not forebear asking.

  "We came to fish," he answered. "Let us pursue the sport as long as we are here."

  "And Spencer and his memoranda?" I asked. "What of them?"

  He ignored my question and countered with one of his own. "The five Royal Coachmen told you nothing, Parker?"

  "Nothing except that the fellow who was so careless could scarcely be called a true disciple of Walton."

  "I submit that they were not dropped by accident."

  "Indeed! And if not, for what purpose were they dropped? Certainly they marked no trail, other than to point the obvious direction Spencer must have gone."

  "Now I thought that extremely significant," replied Pons. He had reached the bank of the Test now, and began gravely to cast. "I thought it so significant that it occurred to me these dry-flies offered nothing less than a complete solution to the puzzle of Spencer's disappearance."

  I stared at him, I fear, agape. "Oh, come, Pons —you are reading too much into them," I protested.

  "It surprises me to hear you say so. You have yourself begun to read them correctly. If the Royal Coachmen were not dropped to serve as a guide —and I daresay they were not dropped for that purpose —then they were certainly dropped for a reason which must have seemed to Spencer a sound one."

  "Aren't you taking too much for granted in assuming that Spencer dropped them?" I asked.

  "I fancy not. In the first place, they present themselves along the only way Spencer could have gone with the least opportunity for observation. Had he gone up, down, or across the water, he would surely have been observed by one or more members of his party. He had no alternative but to utilize the cover of the trees and retreat toward the railway and road; so much must have been evident not only to him, but to anyone who might seek to abduct him. I submit that he dropped the five Royal Coachmen intentionally. It follows then that he was not carried off by main force, for if he had been, he would have been unable to drop the flies; and if part of his paraphernalia were to be lost while he was being dragged away, it is beyond the bounds of coincidence that that part should be only five flies, each exactly the same as the others. No, I submit that he was not carried off by main force, as the Foreign Secretary seems to believe, but went voluntarily. I submit, further, that that is the only tenable solution, since it is hardly conceivable that he could have been forcibly abducted in broad daylight without someone at least having seen him. Remember that the tinker's van stands directly in the line of his passage, that the house beyond also commands the way he would of necessity have come from the bank of the stream."

  "But if he went voluntarily," I objected, "would he not have been guilty of a breach of duty?"

  "How? His duty lay in silence about the basic ratio and the accompanying memoranda. We have no reason to believe that he divulged these data."

  "Then why has he not communicated with his superiors?"

  "Because he is either dead or being prevented from doing so; I am inclined to believe the latter."

  I was baffled and confessed my perplexity.

  "My dear Parker, it is most elementary," said Pons. "I have seldom come upon such a satisfying example of the pristine effectiveness of the science of deduction as these five Royal Coachmen.

  One might almost say they are unique, for any variable amount of deductions might be made from them, but all must eventually reduce to a series of inevitable facts. Let us just pause for a moment and examine one of the dry-flies whose presence at the scene conveys so much information to the meticulous observer."

  He laid aside his rod and I did likewise. He sat down on a fallen tree-bole, and took one of the Royal Coachmen from his pocket.

  "Now these are excellently made — but they are not a commercial product, as an old hand at the rod must observe at once. Spencer is a fly-tying enthusiast; you will recall Lord Kilvert's saying so. It is perfectly reasonable to suppose that this is a product of his own hand, as doubtless are the quartet remaining in my pocket. But does it not seem to you a little more full than most?"

  "There is some permissible variation."

  He paused and looked under the cover of his creel, where he carried some dry-flies of his own. "Ah, here we are. Let us compare this commercial Royal Coachman of my own with this discovery."

  He held the two up together.

  "Well, Spencer's has a thicker body."

  "Capital, Parker. In almost every other respect they seem similar. There is no variation in the wing, none in the hurl, none in hook or hackle. The quality of the red silk thread about the body appears to be the same; while Spencer has spared the shellac, certainly the thread is of the same size."

  "But Spencer has used more of it. He has wound the body more thickly," I put in.

  "Let us just have a closer look at it."

  So saying, he drew the hurl down the hook, caught hold of the red silk thread, snapped it, and began patiently to unwind it, his eyes agleam with anticipation. What he expected to find, I had no way of knowing. What he found was a tiny slip of paper, not more than an eighth of an inch wide, and scarcely an inch long, wound carefully around the hook beneath the thread which made up the body of the dry-fly.

  "I daresay this is what we want," said Pons, with satisfaction.

  He unrolled the slip of paper and laid it face upward in his palm so that I could see, written in ink upon it, a series of numerals. I read them —"5-5-3, 4-4-3, 3-3-2."

  "A cipher?" I ventured.

  Pons shook his head impatiently. "No, no. These figures are surely understandable enough. England's five ships to America's five to Japan's three, and so on. The Japanese are quite right in suspecting that naval status inferior to that of the other maritime nations is planned at the Naval Conference. This is surely nothing else but a memorandum pertinent to the basic naval ratio. There is hardly any need to take apart the others; they will contain similar information. The question which now remains is this: did Spencer have these memoranda committed to memory, together with the basic ratio, or were these jottings his sole recourse? Let us presume for the moment that they were his sole source of information, and we find ready to hand the explanation of why he dropped them. He did so not to point a way for possible pursuit, but simply to rid himself of this information because he suspected that something was amiss, and knew that if a fellow-angler found these flies and used them, the water would soon eradicate what ink there was on the papers."

  "But if he went voluntarily, I fail to follow your reasoning, Pons."

  "Because you are making it a question of either-or," replied Pons. "He might have gone without duress and yet have grave doubts of his wisdom in so doing. In short, he may have been enticed away. He is a young man; he is doubtless a romantic idealist — it would take something of that to put a man into Foreign Affairs in our time, I daresay. Very well, then. Let us reconstruct the event.

  "Young Rigby Spencer is fishing, with his precious cargo so adroitly concealed on his person — hooked into his hatband or his belt or a pocket or even his creel. He is fishing off the rise when he is accosted by someone in need of help —a motorist, perhaps a young woman, whose car has come to grief along the road. Someone may have been waiting for days to find him alone at an auspicious place and time. He cannot resist the appeal to his gallantry; but, having assented and begun to follow, he has qualms and, perhaps as surreptitiously as possible, he drops the telltale Royal Coachmen. If they were seen, no significance was likely to be attached to them; he might have reasoned that it would be so, though his place of concealment was doubtless originally planned to protect his information from foreign members of his party. By the time he realized that his suspicions were well-founded, it was too late for him to turn back."

  "Even a romantic idealist ought to be able to recognize a foreign agent," I protested.

  "Excellent, Parker!" cried Pons. "You have hit upon my
own demurrer. Let us ask ourselves whether Spencer's secret might not be as valuable to a traitorous Englishman who could offer it for sale, as to a foreign agent? I submit that the entire operation against Spencer is a little too daring and at the same time a little too crude to tempt a foreign agent. No, what seemed obvious to me from the outset was that there had been a leak from the Foreign Office itself, and someone had acted upon it. Spencer had not yet tipped his hand in conference; there was no other avenue but secret information from the source to know him the bearer of the memoranda, any more than there is now reason to suppose that there is any other tenable explanation of the five Royal Coachmen."

  I admitted that Pons's deductions were cogent. "But then, where is Rigby Spencer? Are we too late to save him?"

  "I rather think not. If he has admitted nothing, he may still be alive, kept so in the hope of wringing these data from him, though with each day that passes, it may be assumed that his worth diminishes. Let us set Inspector Jamison on the track."

  He took up his rod and walked rapidly back along the bank of the Test.

  We came upon Jamison where we had left him. At the moment he was engaged in giving directions to two young constables, but, catching sight of us, he left off what he was saying and grinned in superior fashion.

  "Still empty-handed, I see. I hardly thought you'd turn him up. We entered and searched every dwelling, cordons were thrown about roads miles away, the train that passed that afternoon was thoroughly examined. We left no stone unturned, even to harassing that tinker and turning his van back there upside down."

  "Spencer could hardly have slipped through your fingers, could he?" said Pons.

  "I doubt it."

  "Then, of course, he is still here. Perhaps you had better take him before some harm is done to him, other than that which may already have befallen him. It can hardly be comfortable to be gagged and bound."

  Jamison's jaw dropped. "You know where he is, Pons?" he cried.

  "You will find him in that tinker's van; it will have either a false top or a false bottom. But watch your step. That old fellow is dangerous and the girl no less so."